Soon after I book my first class at Othership Yorkville (one of the company’s growing fleet of sauna and ice bath–equipped spas, which currently includes two Toronto locations and one in New York’s Flatiron District that opened in July), I receive a registration email telling me, “We can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” In person during my session a few days later (“Guided All Around: Inner Power”), there is a whole lot more where that came from. Othership is here to make you sweat, but also to help you explore, journey and evolve. All this to say, your mileage will vary based on your tolerance for wellness mantras and your willingness to engage in spiritual introspection. But even if you’re skeptical, it’s still worth walking through the front doors at one of its locations. (You’ll know them by the large handles carved in the shape of the brand’s Spirograph logo.) 

What awaits on the other side is an amber-hued temple designed by Futurestudio, the red-hot Toronto firm that has spent the past few years reviving the city’s nightlife scene with bars and restaurants that deliver a memorable sense of theatricality. And while a visit to any one of the culinary hot spots bearing founder Ali McQuaid Mitchell’s fingerprints (including the gold-ceilinged Bar Prima and circus-themed Piano Piano on Colborne Street) is enough to restore your faith in the magic of a great evening out, the experience that awaits at Othership is perhaps something even more profound: an alternative form of social outing that is built not around food and drink but rather around deeper nourishment of the mind, body and soul. “We’ve been really lucky to be able to have a hand in the culture of the city right now,” McQuaid Mitchell says. “But honestly, it’s just because amazing, ambitious people have come to us and trusted us. Our clients are bringing it in terms of their food or their experience programming, so it’s up to us as designers to do everything we can to enhance that.”

To understand Othership’s early success, you must first meditate on the many stresses of modern life. Am I saving enough for retirement? Is A.I. coming for my job? Will the planet still be habitable in 2050? And, in a slightly less urgent sense, How does anybody even go out anymore? “Mindful drinking” is on the rise, and Gen Z is imbibing the least of all; even kombucha has probably become too strong for somebody in your social circle. Yet with so much of a city’s nightlife built around alcohol, it can be difficult to know how to catch up with old friends — let alone meet new ones — in dry settings. And if we don’t come up with some compelling answers to keep downtown alive, our loneliness epidemic isn’t going to solve itself.

Enter Othership. The company’s CEO, Robbie Bent, became sober six years ago after a silent meditation retreat helped him take control of his struggles with addiction. Upon his return, he started frequenting saunas as a way of going out on the weekends while still avoiding alcohol. It wasn’t long before he and his wife, Emily, had built a garage bathhouse of their very own, where they soon invited Toronto friends — and, later, a small network of other referrals — to join them for guided breathwork. The enthusiastic response eventually encouraged the couple to start thinking about how they could bring that same experience to the masses, and in 2021, they co-founded Othership alongside Myles Farmer, Amanda Laine and Harrison Taylor. 

While McQuaid Mitchell didn’t have any specific spa design experience, the Othership crew was nevertheless drawn to the transportive, energizing quality of Futurestudio’s portfolio. “One of the things they communicated was that this was not going to be a quiet spa where you’re shushed,” the designer says. “It was going to be a much more lively experience.”

To announce these ambitions, the company signed its first lease in Toronto’s Entertainment District. In doing so, it established itself as an early leader in the ongoing boom in wellness destinations — including, in Toronto alone, Alter (another hydrotherapy hot spot), Trove (which adds nurse-administered IVs into the mix) and Jaybird (which is really just a yoga and Pilates studio, but a very mindful one with a signature scent, no mirrors, and dim infrared lighting). Originating in Vancouver, Jaybird is co-owned by Bent’s sister, and both its Yorkville location and Trove are also designed by Futurestudio. In other words, even as the boutique health club sector has grown, Othership has remained more or less at the centre of the orbit.

Granted, social sweating and bathing have a long history, dating from public baths in ancient Greece and Rome to the Russian banyas, Turkish hammams and Korean jjimjilbang that now dot Toronto’s suburbs — not to mention the downtown bathhouses that endure as historic places of refuge for the gay community in the wake of 1981’s Operation Soap raids. Further afield, Finland and Estonia’s sauna traditions even rank on UNESCO’s Cultural Heritage List.

When McQuaid Mitchell came on board, the Othership team presented her with a binder of global bathhouse research. “There’s this common thread in so many cultures throughout history,” she says. “In some ways, what they are doing is so new, and in other ways, it’s as old as time.” The look and feel that she developed for the company’s spas speaks directly to that eternal state, establishing spaces that feel as primordial as they do forward-thinking.

On the time-honoured end of the spectrum, Othership’s reception areas introduce a palette of age-old building materials — wood and brick — that preview the cedar-clad sauna and masonry-wrapped ice bath room soon to follow. Adding to the elemental feel, the change areas and communal shower spaces feature floors made from sliced river rocks that create the sensation of a midnight nature walk. “We wanted it to feel like you were stepping on something natural, not something manufactured,” explains McQuaid Mitchell. “The rocks bring warmth but also an inconsistency — similar to the bricks. Some of them are perfect but some of them are not, and there’s differences in the spacing of them, as well as just a natural variety in the product itself that adds to the overall texture.”

McQuaid Mitchell notes that all these materials have been carefully chosen not just for their aesthetic appeal but also for their performance merits. Those river rock floors, for instance, boast excellent slip resistance, while the bleacher seating in the front tea lounge (a temperate zone used for class orientations that is also open to anyone looking to take a break from the thermal circuit) is upholstered in easy to-clean marine vinyl to keep it from absorbing sweat. Backdropping this relaxation area, hanging patchwork tapestries by Studio La Beauté and a textile installation by Charlotte Blake billow gently as if caught by the wind (in fact, it’s the HVAC pumping in a steady supply of fresh air). “The functionality of the space requires so many hard materials, but we wanted to still have an element of softness,” says McQuaid Mitchell.

For all of Othership’s old-world charm, it also incorporates plenty of contemporary innovations — from booming speakers to carefully calibrated mood lighting. The most prominent fixture is a giant circular pendant (a custom Anony design) that floats above the tea lounge with UFO-like presence. Moving into the sauna, a series of glowing strips pulse and change colour, while a cluster of RBW’s Ripple and Dimple sconces in the showers balance natural inspiration with sci-fi flair.

Critically, everything is calibrated at 2200 Kelvin — the same golden glow as candlelight. “It’s not a light temperature that’s off-the-shelf for the most part, so in some cases we had to actually paint the bulbs to get that,” McQuaid Mitchell says. “We talked about making people feel really comfortable in their bathing suits, so a lot of the time, the light is placed to illuminate the task and not the person.” As a result, the environment doesn’t feel overly cruisy, although a few people have surely locked eyes and struck up conversation over tea during the Friday night mixers.

This brings us to programming. Othership offers three main types of experiences: guided group sessions, evening socials (where the music and lighting skew closer to what you might find on a dance floor) and flexible drop-in hours. The guided classes (which cost $55 for a single booking and typically happen four times a day) are the best way to really tune out the world — complete with breathwork and visualization exercises, scent bombs that fill the sauna with notes of cedar and vetiver or cinnamon and orange, and vulnerable (yet optional) group discussions. Especially if you’re looking to work up the courage to submerge your body in an ice-cold pool, some peer encouragement never hurts.

At first, dropping into zero-degree water after having just sat in a sweltering sauna for 20-odd minutes feels painful and panic-inducing. But 30 seconds later, I’m left with a strange sense of accomplishment. As I step out of the ice bath, several of my classmates high-five me. Our instructor congratulates us all on being brave. Depending on your level of cynicism, this will either offer evidence of Othership’s warm community atmosphere or feel like a journey to the centre of a healing crystal. People here tend to talk like they just got back from Burning Man.

Either way, after two more dips, we carry on to our final round in the sauna. The wall speakers, which had previously been pounding out a series of thumping beats, switch to something sweeping and ethereal — classic dream-sequence music. Our fearless leader prompts everyone to close their eyes and visualize walking through a field. “You start to notice your childhood home in the distance,” she says. “You keep walking until you are standing in front of it.” We can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it. Our guide tells us to open the door. Someone next to me starts to gently sob.

At some point after we’ve all entered the homes we grew up in and thanked our younger selves for allowing us to become the person we are today, our instructor invites everyone to open their eyes and share how they’re feeling. Expressions of genuine gratitude quickly pour out. “This was amazing. I never make time for myself — all I do is work.” “I really needed somewhere to scream today.” “I owe so much to my friend for talking me into coming here.” You don’t necessarily need to reach the astral plane to walk out of Othership feeling refreshed. And I will say this: During much of my time there, I completely forgot that I was sitting in a basement below a construction site for an upcoming location of Mandy’s Gourmet Salads. 

It is thanks to Futurestudio’s obsessive, down-to-the-smallest-detail approach that Othership manages to stir the soul the way that it does. “I think, as a team at Futurestudio, we’re just always wondering when we’re in a space, Why shouldn’t it just be the best it could be in every way?” McQuaid Mitchell says. “The lighting should be perfect, the floor, the tables — while still leaving room for natural imperfection, too.”

In turn, if there is anyone who can attest to Othership’s true power, it is her. “I have a really fast pace here at the studio, and I do almost nothing creative during the day — instead, I’m dealing with job sites, or contractors, or emails, or all the other running-a-business things,” she says. “Then I get into my creative zone at night. So when I know that I need uninterrupted creative time, I’ll go to Othership, come home and then work on a project with the clarity that it gives me.”

Back when McQuaid Mitchell first started working with Bent, he asked her what her dream project would be. “I immediately said something in New York City,” she recalls. “When he signed the lease [for Othership Flatiron], he called me up and said, ‘We’re making your dream come true.’ Whenever I land in New York, the energy of the city is just incredible, so I’m really proud of being able to create something that’s part of that in some small way.” The new location maintains Othership’s trademark look but executes it at the biggest scale yet — with a 60 square-metre sauna that is the largest in America. McQuaid Mitchell is now in the process of designing a second U.S. Othership, set to open in Brooklyn early next year.

Expect more to follow: The company is currently in expansion mode, buoyed by $10 million in financing from investors that include pop star (and meditation evangelist) Shawn Mendes. Let the transcendental work continue. “More than ever, people want to have an experience that they won’t have at home,” McQuaid Mitchell says. “So it’s just rising to meet that expectation and letting people get lost.” Anyone can open a spa. But not just anyone can start a full-blown cultural phenomenon. 

What sets Othership’s NYC debut apart? Even though Othership’s Flatiron space is the company’s third location, the process of translating its signature experience from Canada to the U.S. meant that, in many ways, Futurestudio was designing its first Othership all over again.

• Building codes necessitated several major updates: New York State requires gendered change rooms, and the tubs in the cold plunge area needed to be sunken into the ground rather than raised on platforms.

• Many of the tradespeople and equipment suppliers also changed. On the other hand, major millwork was done by the same fabricator that had worked on the Yorkville location (Canara Woodworking), including a reception desk and stadium seating built in Toronto and shipped in for easier oversight.

• McQuaid Mitchell continued to work with Toronto collaborators like Anony, Studio La Beauté and Charlotte Blake. For its part, Anony adapted its signature circular light fixture into a ring shape that wraps around the Social Commons fireplace.